WAN Governance

Unified Communications – A perfect WAN Governance Business Case

Unified Communications (UC) offer huge opportunities for the enterprise, with benefits including improved productivity, easier collaboration, better customer satisfaction and ultimately, higher profits through more efficient teamwork and competitive advantage. But UC come with their distinct challenges and not every project yields the anticipated ROI.

Challenge 1: UC implementations are a significant investment. If they are to yield a good ROI and deliver a suitable user experience, then their performance must be guaranteed as they rely heavily on the Wide Area Network (WAN). Recent research about Unified Communications deployments demonstrated an average Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of $36 per user and per month, without WAN circuit costs and large distance charges.

Challenge 2: UC are made up of data, video and voice flows with dynamic, variable traffic patterns that grow or subside based on user demand. A single desktop video flow means upwards of 300-500 Kbps between branch office sites. In turn, this can result in UC applications impacting the performance of other business critical applications during peaks of high demand.

Challenge 3: UC encourage desktop to desktop video communication which is wonderful for productivity, but they place enormous strain on inter-branch WAN links that carry this traffic. Traditional static Classes of Services (CoS) are not able to match such complex traffic situations and overall business application performance is put at risk.

Scenario – Let's consider a company with 5,000 employees in the Professional Services industry that is deploying Unified Communications. The company has an IT budget aligned to its industry standard, i.e. $975/user/month (among which $320 is allocated to applications). A full featured WAN Governance system will typically have a TCO of $3/user/month (including central devices, management opex and unforeseen project incidents), for the following benefits:

• Guaranteeing the quality of the UC applications (an investment of $36/user/month);
• Protecting the performance of the other business critical applications (ERP, CRM, file sharing, cloud apps, Internet, etc.) against resource intensive UC (an average investment of $320/user/month);
• Automatic incident prevention, better helpdesk productivity and IT governance will save a very conservative $15/user/month;
• Delaying bandwidth upgrades by a few years, saving an average of $15/user/month;
• Optionally deploying hybrid networks for accessing large resources at low cost (e.g. desktop video), dividing the cost of incremental Mbps by 3 to 5.

Not deploying WAN Governance would jeopardize not only the success of UC deployment but also the performance of the other business applications. Unsatisfied users and business managers will complain, lowering UC adoption and forcing IT to upgrade the WAN at a high cost (without being sure of the impact).

Alignment with the company's strategic goals – Guaranteeing the success of its UC project, WAN Governance leverages the company's investment to improve its efficiency and productivity through better collaboration. Moreover, enterprises in the B-to-C sector will significantly increase their customer satisfaction and their competitive advantage.

Béatrice Piquer-Durand

Olympics are coming – time to panic? (2/2)

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Why bandwidth isn't the answer

There are two solutions: companies can purchase more bandwidth before the Olympics; or companies can use what they have more effectively through WAN Governance tools to regulate the flow of applications across networks. Adding more bandwidth isn't the solution. First, throwing money at the problem is not an option in our time of IT budget restriction. Second, non-critical applications will take much of the new bandwidth, making users of critical applications still experience poor performance. This is due to the way that internet protocol is designed. TCP (Transport Control Protocol) operates as a layer for protocol on top of IP. Designed with the internet in the 1980s to be able to share limited, poor quality resources, TCP is structured to seize all possible available bandwidth. This means more bandwidth, applied indiscriminately, isn't the solution for TCP applications. Moreover, video (over TCP or UDP) is now behaving the same, with dynamic codec using all possible bandwidth to provide the best available quality and web sites providing high resolution streaming… Who can rule all these situations?

It's not size, it's sophistication

The solution lies in having tools that allow an IT department to control applications as they flow across the network, according to performance objectives and business requirements. Such monitoring and controlling is known as WAN Governance. Through WAN Governance, IT departments can see how applications are moving, who is using them and for what purpose. IT departments can then prioritize applications accordingly and automatically control every single application flows.

If we think of networks as roads, and applications as cars, a WAN Governance tool might be a police officer. It can direct cars into appropriate queues. It can slow cars that are less critical to the business (for instance, the YouTube car) and prioritise those that the business depends on (such as the Salesforce or SAP cars). This then allows vehicles to get to their destination in a timely, secure fashion – regardless of the amount of traffic on the 'road'. It also prevent the government to build new costly infrastructure.

SAP or Olympics? Your business requires the former, your employees and colleagues want the latter… this is why the need for the control provided by WAN Governance is becoming more imperious than ever.

Béatrice Piquer-Durand

Olympics are coming – time to panic? (1/2)

The 2012 London Olympics are coming. Data centres and companies alike must be prepared, lest they risk the performance of business critical applications. What will these challenges mean for datacentres and companies? Why does application performance matter? And how can these challenges can be proactively handled?

The challenges of the Olympics

The Olympic Games threaten to stress UK networks like never before. BT, the official communications sponsor of the Games, announced that the Olympics are 'the most complex logistical peacetime challenge [they've] had to face'. Every second BT expects 6GB of information to travel across their Olympic-designated networks, equivalent to 6,000 novels, or the entire contents of Wikipedia every five seconds. In preparation, BT is investing 640,000 man hours into the Olympic project. O2 also is investing £50 million to increase its reliability around Olympic sites by deploying new temporary antenna.

It's no surprise BT is concerned about the impact of the Olympics on networks. Consider a related international event: the 2011 World Cup. During the World Cup, mobile bandwidth data usage increased by 24%. Web browsing traffic increased by 35% during match time. YouTube grew by 32% on post-match mornings, while lunchtime matches showed the largest bandwidth increase with 31%. Video streaming increased by 11%. Networks faced unprecedented traffic flows.

There are reasons to believe the Olympics will generate greater data levels than even the World Cup. Unlike the Olympics, World Cup matches are single events taking place at a single time, and after matches the crowds dissipate to wider areas, drawing on different infrastructure. Similarly, the World Cup takes place over a larger geographic area with stadia hundreds of miles apart, meaning communications demands are not so concentrated. The Olympics are a different ballgame. Closely concentrated, incredibly complex, the Olympics threaten to challenge networks like never before. Indeed, they will challenge networks as only one other thing can: the future, when such ever-active applications streaming to and fro across networks will become the norm.

What these challenges mean

During an average week, 56% of UK office-based employees watch online video while at work. Roughly 66% of UK employees indicated they watch more than one hour of online video per week from the office. A large portion of the Olympics will occur during business hours; employees will go online to track events. So take the traffic stats mentioned above, and expand it to – quite literally – Olympic sized proportions.

If companies aren't prepared, their business critical applications will be affected as they compete against YouTube, BBC iPlayer and online video for limited resources. IT departments need to know how to guard against this.

The failure of business critical applications can really cost an organisation. For instance, a high-volume online store bringing in £25,000 per hour could crash due to a single network failure. If the outage lasts several hours, the monetary impact can be quite significant. IDC recently estimated the cost of an 11-hour IT outage at around £600,000.

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Béatrice

http://www.silicon.com/technology/networks/2009/02/26/why-bt-is-panicking-about-the-2012-olympics-39399786/

² http://www.dcseurope.info/news_full.php?id=21116

The Economic Case for Cloud Computing (Part 2/2)

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Hidden Costs of Cloud Computing - So much of what makes the cloud beneficial to companies – its scalability, its flexibility, its collaborative nature – also adds expense. The fact that IT infrastructure is not in-house means that it's owned by someone other than the company, creating compliance and security risks. The storing of data on foreign servers creates concerns about compliance with privacy standards and regulation of data access. The increased use of cloud-hosted applications creates stressed networks. All these things, by requiring additional resources and manpower, add expense to cloud computing.

Securing Data in the Cloud - Security is an undeniable concern for companies. R&D procedures, clinical trials results, marketing information, industry sales details, and other company-sensitive information must be protected from falling into the wrong hands. Owing to the external nature of cloud computing, where third-party users may be managing servers, unknown personnel may have difficult-to-monitor administrative access privileges. Companies offering cloud computing don't simply allow these security concerns to go unaddressed; most provide extensive firewalls, security codes, and other business practices to build customer confidence and guarantee protection. Yet companies must likewise be active, through encrypting data, monitoring the activities of privileged third parties and demanding greater visibility from cloud providers about how they are securing hosted information.

Compliance of Data Hosted in the Cloud - Most data compliance laws and regulations were written under the assumption that the liable party controls both the infrastructure where data is stored, and the ability to make decisions about where that storage is located. This means that most compliance laws assign responsibility to the user of a cloud computing environment. Such laws have, in the past, tended to limit activity in the cloud to the manipulation of data that doesn't involve intellectual property or patents. To ensure compliance, companies must monitor the infrastructure of the cloud, made difficult by the ever-shifting, adjusting nature of the cloud. As with security, this activity requires a monitoring and service assurance operation to be established.

As IT Becomes less Complex, Networking Complexity and Cost can Increase - By moving to the cloud, companies simplify and streamline IT, concentrating it in a few locations – some of which they control, some of which they don't. This means that the link between the user of the data, and where the data sits, is more complicated than before. In a nutshell, the network is more important and vastly more complex than ever before. If companies can't deliver data, the economics of the cloud will be reduced. A wealth of research and information hosted in the cloud will provide no benefit if it can't move to where it needs to be. Likewise, applications hosted in the cloud will be pointless if a CIO can't guarantee their performance. If a company has 30,000 employees working from other offices, it's important they aren't waiting behind their laptops for applications to work.

According to Gartner, average IT costs represent €800 per employee - and the cost of the networks that support the delivery of that IT is only a fraction of the total. Nevertheless, a move to the cloud necessitates investment in the network. As users access more cloud applications, networks can turn into the London M25, with too much traffic competing for network resources. In this situation, rather than adding new costly lanes to the motorway, savvy firms are protecting the performance of business critical applications by practicing WAN governance. The basic premise is to build greater intelligence into the network so that when network resources are assigned priority is given to those users of business critical applications such as an ERP system, rather than bandwidth hungry applications like YouTube or Facebook. You can think of this like adding a priority lane to the motorway, or how Transport for London is planning to help athletes move around the city during the Olympic Games next year.

Conclusion - It is inevitable that business is using the cloud in some capacity. Users accessing applications such as LinkedIn or YouTube are already accessing this software as a service. Gartner, the noted IT analysis firm, has predicted that cloud computing revenues will top $150 billion by 2013 as a large number of firms change their IT model. When considering the cloud, it's important to remember there is no IT nirvana and not all costs are immediately obvious. Cloud computing requires a change in mindset as technical teams become responsible for guaranteeing service and application delivery, rather than 'doing' the nuts and bolts of IT.

(A full version of this article has been previously published on Samedan)

Illustration: « La fée électricité » (details), by Raoul Dufy (1937) – It is a really big painting… and other "fairies".

The Economic Case for Cloud Computing (Part 1/2)

In Nicholas Carr's work The Big Switch, the development of IT is likened to the development of the modern electric utility grid 100 years ago, when companies stopped generating their own power with steam engines and dynamos and plugged into the newly built electric grid (1). Today, a similar revolution is underway. Hooked up to the internet's global computing grid, massive information-processing plants have begun pumping data and software code into businesses. According to Carr, computing is now turning into a utility. But how will cloud computing change the economics of IT and is it really as simple as signing up to low cost computing-as-a-service?

Reduced IT Capital Expenditure - This is one of the most cited and most immediately obvious benefits of cloud computing. By allowing individuals to access centralized IT resources using network-based computing, cloud reduces the need for investment in hardware and/or software at business locations. Combined with outsourcing of infrastructure and adoption of software-as-a-service (SAAS), up-front hardware and software license costs can be exchanged for a rental model, like any other utility service. The something-as-a-service (XAAS) model means that infrastructure, software and platforms are all provided by third party IT suppliers, effectively removing the need for any up front IT investment.

IT Economies of Scale and Efficiency - Synonymous with cloud computing is centralization of the IT estate and servers, either in a company's own data center or that of a cloud provider. In this circumstance there is the ability to virtualize the IT environment, and this means a server can run multiple applications rather than just one, as was traditionally the case. For instance, say a pharma company purchases a server to utilize in traditional IT models. Regardless of whether or not this server is being utilized, the ongoing cost still exists, with the machine often running well below capacity. With virtualization in a centralized environment, other jobs can be shifted onto the spare capacity of dormant servers and it's possible to run servers at over 90 per cent utilization.

The Opportunity to Contribute - The cloud enables communication at all levels: across the office, across the hall, across the nation and around the globe. Complex genetic sequences and biomarker data are being hosted in the cloud at an increasing rate. Data is available for access by pharma companies according to research needs. This allows an increased collaboration of existing knowledge – and the financial benefit of not having to conduct research when that research has already been done. For instance, advances in nanoscale and microfluidic chemistry means that DNA can be monitored by photographic sensors, producing collected images of up to 800 gigabytes. According to Chris Dagdigian, principal consultant for BioTeam Inc, "this creates a massive data-capture and handling problem. We are now in an era where instruments that are showing up in very small wet laboratories are capable of producing a terabyte or more of data in a day (2)."

Scalability - The ability to expand or contract servers as necessary allows companies to pay for computing time as they need it, rather than maintaining their own servers. With the cloud, using one server for 1,000 hours costs nearly no more than using 1,000 servers for one hour. Such flexibility is, in a sense, priceless. Take this example from Michael Naimoli, Microsoft's National Director of US Life Sciences, about programs to process protein folding (3): "Look at all the data that goes into protein folding. Companies are currently developing large molecule products – usually called monoclonal antibodies. The activity of that molecule is bound up in how it folds itself. During the discovery process they like to look at the primary sequence of that product and they want to do calculations about how it's going to fold. They have traditionally maintained a large number of CPUs that have to be spun up around that activity and it can take 70 hours to finish up the whole protein folding analysis.

Maximizing Efficiency of IT Staff - This is one of those 'hidden' economic benefits of cloud computing, something not immediately recognized, yet still very much a reality. Maximizing the efficiency of IT people occurs in two ways. Firstly, companies make better use of staff as a byproduct of concentrating servers in larger datacenters. This concentration means fewer workers are needed for infrastructure management. There are fewer people per server, freeing up staff for other activities and resulting in financial savings. Secondly, cloud computing allows a company to reduce the mix of skills it maintains on the payroll. Most companies do not want to acquire skills for the management of all applications they're likely to use – the skills to host and manage different applications, for instance, which can require lengthy training of staff. As hosting and managing exists in the cloud and is more often than not delivered by a third party specialist, companies are free to concentrate their energies on what matters: using the applications.

Minimizing Response Times - Using the cloud is fairly simple. This ease of use, combined with the ability to communicate with a team anywhere across the globe (as information and applications are not tied to a particular location), provides certain economic benefits. Companies can stop or start processes almost instantly. Such rapid responses can be the difference between funds gained or lost. Consider a quote from Eli Lilly's Dave Powers, the firm's associate information consultant for discovery IT, on the firm's usage of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud service: "We were recently able to launch a 64-machine cluster computer working on bioinformatics sequence information, complete the work, and shut it down in 20 minutes. It cost $6.40. To do that internally – to go from nothing to getting a 64-machine cluster installed and qualified – is a 12-week process (4)."

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References

1. Carr N, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, 2008
2. Mullin R, The New Computing Pioneers, Chemical and Engineering News 87(21): pp10-14, 2009
3. Koroneos G, Pharma and Cloud Computing: Are We There Yet?, http://blog.pharmexec.com/2010/06/16/pharma-and-cloud-computing-are-we-there-yet/, 2010
4. Mullin R, The New Computing Pioneers, Chemical and Engineering News 87(21): pp10-14, 2009

Illustration: « La fée électricité » (details), by Raoul Dufy (1937).